Discussion on writing and publishing novels and short fiction

There was Malaysian magic present the British Fantasy Awards yesterday (Sept 25). Selangor-born Zen Cho was voted Best Newcomer for her book, Sorcerer To The Crown, at the awards held at FantasyCon 2016 in Scarborough, England.

The book is set in Regency-era London and sees Zacharias Wythe, England’s first African Sorcerer Royal, attempting to discover why the country’s magical stocks are drying up. Published by Macmillan, it is the first story in Cho’s Sorcerer Royal historical fiction trilogy.

She beat The Long Way To A Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers, The Vagrant Peter Newman, The Heir To The North by Steven Poore, and When The Heavens Fall by Marc Turner. Sorcerer To The Crown was also nominated for Best Fantasy Novel, but that award went to Naomi Novik’s Uprooted.

Cho, 30, currently resides in London and was the first Malaysian to receive the William L Crawford Fantasy Award from the International Association For The Fantastic In The Arts, for her book Spirits Abroad, a collection of short stories within the speculative fiction genre. She was also the editor of Cyberpunk: Malaysia, a collection of science fiction stories published by Fixi Novo.

We are presently in a golden age of global SF and fantasy, and Zen Cho is a big reason for it. Authors from all over the world, many of them women, are incorporating new cultural concepts in genres that had been at risk of what might be called ossified Tolkienism. In both her novel and her stories, Cho is a fresh, distinct voice. I look forward to her next novels and short stories.

Just last month I was touring the Nobel Museum in Stockholm, so I know where Alice Munro will be in December when she steps across the cobblestones of Stockholm's Gamla Stan to accept her Nobel Prize. To explain the importance of this achievement, Margaret Atwood writes in The Guardian: Alice Munro's road to Nobel literature prize was not easy. Excerpt:

Alice Munro has been awarded the Nobel prize in literature, thus becoming its 13th female recipient. It's a thrilling honour for a major writer: Munro has long been recognised in North America and the UK, but the Nobel will draw international attention, not only to women's writing and Canadian writing, but to the short story, Munro's chosen métier and one often overlooked.

Whenever the Nobel is conferred, a deluge of media descends – like the pack of cards cascading on to that other Alice, she of Wonderland – not only on the winner, illuminated in the sudden glare of international publicity like a burglar trapped in headlights, but on every other writer who has known the chosen one. A quote, a reminiscence, an evaluation! Account for it! Why her? they clamour.

Munro herself is unlikely to say much along these lines: Canadians are discouraged from bragging – see the Munro story, Who Do You Think You Are? – so will probably spend much of her time hiding in the figurative tool shed.

We're all slightly furtive, we writers; especially we Canadian writers, and even more especially we Canadian female writers of an earlier generation. "Art is what you can get away with," said Canadian Marshall MacLuhan, and I invite the reader to count how many of the murderers in Munro's stories are ever caught. (Answer: none.) Munro understands the undercover heist that is fiction writing, as well as its pleasures and fears: how delicious to have done it, but what if you get found out?

Sometime in the 1970s I met Alice Munro at some literary event in Vancouver, when I was a young college teacher using her short stories in my CanLit course. She was a cheerful, friendly person, and I feel proud to have been in her presence long ago.

I was as agog as anyone about the new app, and downloaded it right away. Tried importing an old novel ms. into it, and was surprised at how easy it was (though formatting could be more of a problem). It clearly looks exciting, and not just for textbook authors, but cooler heads are already commenting: Books Author for Authors - Matt Gemmell. His intro to a detailed analysis:

Apple launched their new education initiative today, with the equally new iBooks Author application for Mac at its core. There’s been a lot of chatter on Twitter and on the web already, with much more to come, but one thing I haven’t seen so far is a simple evaluation of the the suitability of iBooks Author and the iBookstore as an authoring and distribution system.

My own interest is from the perspective of an independent author with a view to self-publishing books that aren’t necessarily textbooks. As with any Apple application, there’s a strong desire to explore it and a tendency to try very hard to retrofit my actual needs to allow me to use the shiny new application. Thus, this brief article is as much about tempering my own enthusiasm with reason, as it is as attempt to share my thoughts.

This province has a literary history going back over a century, but we seem to have forgotten most of our key authors. These ten managed to write a kind of collective history in fiction of British Columbia.

Fortunately, their books are still available in the Vancouver Public Library and several post-secondary libraries in the lower mainland. You can also preview some of them in Google Books, and order full copies online.

Click through to read the list. And as long as you're on The Tyee's site, I've got another piece up today: BC's Literary World Online: Key Links. It includes publishers, authors, little magazines, and writers' groups.